More on Syria

[rowan]

Legend!

If Seymour Hersh had only broken the story of the massacre of unarmed civilians at My Lai in Vietnam by the United States Army in 1968, it would have been enough to make a career. But that was only one story in a range of stories that this feisty and independent journalist has broken over the course of his long career. He was the one who pointed his finger at a host of stories, including the U.S. programmes for chemical and biological weapons, the Israeli nuclear bomb and the shenanigans of the Nixon White House regarding Vietnam and Watergate. Recently, it was Hersh who wrote important stories on the death of Osama bin Laden and on allegations of the use of chemical weapons in the war in Syria. Each of his stories is received as a bombshell, largely because the story is likely to be a bombshell.

Over his long career, Hersh has worked for major U.S. publications such as The New York Times and for smaller outlets such as the Dispatch News Service. He did not care where he wrote as long as he could report with freedom and write with his usual bluntness. It was not prestige that Hersh was after, but the story. This is clear across his fascinating autobiography—Reporter: A Memoir (2018). Winning the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the U.S. atrocities in My Lai did not stir him. It simply meant that he had done the right thing. It did not inflate his personality or make him eager for more establishment accolades. He won the Pulitzer Prize because he deserved it. If he wrote another story that deserved a prize, well, then he would get it. There was no need to write for the prize. To learn to write for the prize puts the reporter in the camp of the establishment. Hersh would have none of that.

Born in a hardscrabble home in Chicago, Hersh had none of the opportunities that were available to many of his peers. He went to college by luck and by determination and went to work with that same attitude. Like many good reporters, Hersh began on the night shift in Chicago, covering stories that taught him the essence of his craft. Listen to people’s stories, surely, but also do not take the word of the authorities without question. One night, in 1964, there was a clash between the police and a group of African Americans. The police told Hersh that the African Americans had shot at the police, hence the retaliation. Hersh rushed back to the Associated Press office, where he worked, and filed his story about how African Americans had fired at the police. His night editor, Bob Olmsted, rewrote the lead. “Gunfire broke out tonight”, Olmsted wrote. When Hersh protested, Olmsted asked him if he had talked to any African Americans. He had not. “I had made no effort to get to the rioters across the police barriers,” Hersh recalled. He did not “begin to know what they thought the riot was about”. On that one night, Hersh writes, Olmsted, who would later be an editor at Chicago Sun-Times, “taught me a master’s degree worth of journalism”.

Stenographers of war

Of course, many master’s courses in journalism do not teach the lesson that one must not become the stenographer of the state. Hersh begins his memoir by saying that today “the reporter is little more than a parrot”. This is a harsh assessment but there is merit to it. So much of the world of journalism now adopts the views of the state without any question. Press releases are directly reprinted as if they are news reports. The view of the state is allowed to define stories of monumental importance. Trust in the state has become a fundamental attitude in newsrooms and amongst opinion writers. Even more so, trust in corporations has become commonplace. If there is an oil spill, the view of the oil company is taken more seriously than the views of the people who are impacted by the spill. This is the lesson that Hersh learned early in his career.

When Hersh went to Washington from his time in Chicago, he was confronted directly with the most important story of the mid 1960s, the U.S. war on Vietnam. Leonard Downie, who was a fixture at The Washington Post, wrote in The New Muckrakers: “Most major stories written by Pentagon correspondents on national issues reflected the official point of view.” There were important exceptions, although these reporters were pilloried for their brutal honesty. As Hersh writes: “If you supported the war, you were objective; if you were against it, you were a lefty and not trustworthy.” Hersh rightly praises the work of Harrison Salisbury, who went to Hanoi for The New York Times and wrote about the morale in Vietnam’s north, as well as about civilian casualties as a result of the U.S. bombing raids on cities and towns. Hersh went into the world of the Pentagon to see if he could corroborate from within the U.S. military what Salisbury found in Vietnam. He was able to do so and wrote landmark pieces both on the collapse of morale in the U.S. forces and on the futility of the bombing raids and on civilian casualties. The leadership of the U.S. military denied all this. Hersh’s conclusion is important: “I had no idea of the extent to which the men running the war would lie to protect their losing hand.”

Hersh’s method

How did Hersh get the stories that other reporters seemed to miss? The first point is his attitude. He cultivated scepticism about governmental and corporate power. Hersh was not awed by the leadership or eager for its approval. This allowed him to ask questions that it did not want asked and that it prevented from being asked by using every means. It is because he did not believe that the U.S. was always good or right that he was able to do the landmark stories that he did. Hersh’s Reporter should be read by young journalists. It is itself an education. There is buried in this book a manual for how to do good journalism. Here are some basic points to explain his method:

(1) Read. Hersh read. “Read before you write,” he notes in reference to an important but buried article that he had read by Elinor Langer in Science, the weekly publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Reading Langer in this obscure publication allowed Hersh to see that the U.S. government was pursuing a chemical and biological weapons programme. He would not have known of such a story or pursued it if he had not read Langer’s work.

(2) Research. Having read Langer, Hersh went to the Pentagon library and read everything available on the chemical and biological weapons programme. He digested whatever public material was available. He learned which U.S. military bases had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. He read the weekly newspapers of those bases. Here he found reports on retirement parties for colonels and generals that offered details about where they had decided to retire. This information was crucial.

(3) Find and cultivate sources. Hersh then travelled to the towns that housed the bases as well as the towns where the retired military officers had moved. He tried to meet retired officers and others to ask them about the weapons programme and its impact on the local communities (as well as on their own health). Painstaking work allowed him to find one or two people who would talk to him and then point him to others. This is how Hersh found William Calley, who gave him the My Lai story. Some of these retired officers were upset by the chemical and biological weapons programme or were disgruntled by being passed over for promotion. “Want to be a good military reporter?” Hersh asks “Find those officers.” Over the course of his career, Hersh cultivated many of these officers and other military officers. They would slip him reports and lead him to other people like themselves. These kind of sources are crucial for the Hersh method. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Colby, would later say of Hersh and the CIA: “He knows more about this place than I do.” He was probably right.

(4) The Hersh rule. In the book, Hersh says that when he interviewed officials he would often ask them about their work outside the story at hand. When he interviewed a judge, for instance, he asked him about his appellate decisions—having read them already. “Never begin an interview by asking core questions,” Hersh writes. “I wanted him to know I was smart and capable of some abstract thought. And I wanted him to like me and, perhaps, trust me.” That judge would eventually deliver Hersh a crucial part of the My Lai story.

(5) Write to learn more, stay on the story. There is something to be said for persistence. Hersh would stay on a story for as long as he needed. He would write short articles, which would shake the trees and draw in more sources—some family member who wanted to say something, some government official (including elected officials) who wanted Hersh to know something. He was not in a hurry to put out his final story. There would be time for that. Journalism, for Hersh, was a process, not about the creation of a product.

(6) Resist intimidation. One of the realities of being a journalist is that you always face intimidation of one kind or another. Murder and imprisonment are the harshest sentences. But there is an everyday quality by which the state and corporations go after reporters. Hersh tells many such stories, including when high government officials would call him up to make him uncomfortable or scared. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you, Seymour?” asked Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger’s loyal deputy. This must have rankled. It was in the context of Hersh’s story about Kissinger and the wiretapping of just about everyone. Hersh stood firm.

All this is fine, but how does one make a living if one follows the Hersh method? Which news house would tolerate this kind of reporter, not only by financing them for extended periods of time as they chased important stories, but also by allowing them to question the government and corporations? Nobody hired Hersh for the totality of his career. He sought a long-term deal with The New York Times but could not get it. “How’s my little commie?” Abe Rosenthal, his boss at The New York Times, said to him in 1971. Hersh says he wrote in the “golden age of journalism”, but his own career was idiosyncratic, funded by an article here or there, a short stint here or there, a book deal here or there. While Hersh grumbles about freelance journalism, his entire career seems peppered with examples of the freelance life.

So much more could be said about Reporter. One hopes that Hersh will come back and write another book about matters to which he alludes at the close of this one. Some of his most important stories in recent years have been about the allegations of the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Hersh’s stories, which raised important questions about the validity of these allegations, had been reported mainly from U.S. government sources. He does not say enough about these stories. One would like to know more. One would like, as well, to know why U.S. publications had refused to run these stories, which eventually ran in British and German publications. “I will happily permit history to be the judge of my recent work,” he writes in the final pages. But this is not enough. Hersh is a good raconteur of the process of his reporting. I would have liked more of his sense of those stories and his judgment about how they were squelched and then received.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/23 ... sh-method/

[Sandydragon]

Noam Chomsky as confirmation. Right oh.

[rowan]

He knows a hell of a lot more than you or anyone else here - evidently!

I see the American mainstream press is reporting that a Syrian military jet was shot down over Israeli air space yesterday. But the UN has ruled in Syria's favor on the Golan Heights, Israel has maintained its illegal occupation regardless and the plane was therefore still in Syrian territory when the Israelis shot it down. So once again the American mainstream press is lying to us.

[rowan]

Interesting report on Britain's support for Turkish operations in Syria: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/uk ... -243982867

[Buggaluggs]

Copy McPastyface is at it again. Will you ever stop polluting this site with reams of dubious paste-shoite?

[rowan]

To students of British history, Britain’s favouring of Islamist-backed military conquest over more liberal, democratic forces comes as no surprise - rather, it is a leitmotif of British foreign policy in the Middle East.

Very true. Britain's entire history has been once of genocidal wars against other nations, and that continues right up to this day. There is no difference between the Britain today and the Britain that was exterminating the native peoples of North America and Australasia, running a brutal slave trade in the Caribbean and mass-murdering, torturing and raping the inhabitants of India and Africa. The only difference is now they do it as part of the US empire, but the tactics are the same, most recently helping America to bomb and destroy Middle Eastern nation after nation, right up to Syria - where they finally failed. Thus the lies and propaganda, the finger-pointing elsewhere, and the support for terrorists who kept civilian hostages as human shields and even unleashed chemical weapons upon them to frame the government and provide the US and its lackeys with a pretext to bomb another sovereign nation - though they most certainly knew the truth all along. Britain and its evil ideology ...

[rowan]

The mop-haired baboon and his delusions:

Brexit is only the latest in a series of British ventures this millennium in which political class has miscalculated what we could accomplish. The process was already evident when Britain was engaged in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and failed to achieve its ends in all three of them.

There is nothing secret about what happened. The Chilcot Report, for instance, lucidly explained in great detail how the British government did not know what it was getting into in Iraq and ended up, after all its efforts, signing a humiliating truce agreement with a local Shia militia in Basra.

Britain was repeatedly caught by surprise by events, tumbling out of Iraq into even bloodier skirmishing in Helmand province in Afghanistan. In Libya, it should have been perfectly obvious that if Gaddafi fell, there was nobody but predatory militias to replace him, and much the same was true in opposing Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

At some point, the British political, diplomatic and military establishment seems to have lost its touch or capacity to learn from experience.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/23 ... h-history/

[Digby]

Still it was a nice touch to seek the evacuation of the brave white helmets before Assad and Putin get really stuck into what might be, for now, the final round of mass executions

[rowan]

Still it was a nice touch to seek the evacuation of the brave white helmets before Assad and Putin get really stuck into what might be, for now, the final round of mass executions

The White Helmets embedded with the terrorists, you mean? It must be very upsetting to the British and Americans to see their proxy head-choppers and child-rapists being finished off. Can't win 'em all

[Digby]

Wibble, said without reading of course, but I'm confident going with a guess of wibble

[Sandydragon]

Gotta love the promAssad propagandists venting so much anger at people risking their lives to save others. Too many inconvenient truths perhaps?

[rowan]

So you support the terrorists then. The White Helmets were embedded with the terrorists, which is why they needed evacuating. Even mainstream news has, for the most part, reported that the Syrians and Russians are driving out the last of ISIS.

I also think it's time you showed a bit of spine and admitted to the fact you had it very wrong on the chemical weapons accusations. The OPCW's findings have made a mockery of this.

[kk67]

Copy McPastyface is at it again. Will you ever stop polluting this site with reams of dubious paste-shoite?

That whole nonsense started as cuntyMccuntface.........

Did you start it, Fella..?. The entire cuntyMcCuntface debacle has got your fingerprints all over it. You or KO.

[Sandydragon]

So you support the terrorists then. The White Helmets were embedded with the terrorists, which is why they needed evacuating. Even mainstream news has, for the most part, reported that the Syrians and Russians are driving out the last of ISIS.

I also think it's time you showed a bit of spine and admitted to the fact you had it very wrong on the chemical weapons accusations. The OPCW's findings have made a mockery of this.

I don’t support any Islamic terrorist. I do support those poor bastards who protested against the Assad regime and got massacred as a result.

I don’t support a mass murdering regime that has used every weapon available to it, including WMDs, to kill its own civilians. You do.

[rowan]

Copy McPastyface is at it again. Will you ever stop polluting this site with reams of dubious paste-shoite?

That whole nonsense started as cuntyMccuntface.........

Did you start it, Fella..?. The entire cuntyMcCuntface debacle has got your fingerprints all over it. You or KO.

Indeed.

[rowan]

So you support the terrorists then. The White Helmets were embedded with the terrorists, which is why they needed evacuating. Even mainstream news has, for the most part, reported that the Syrians and Russians are driving out the last of ISIS.

I also think it's time you showed a bit of spine and admitted to the fact you had it very wrong on the chemical weapons accusations. The OPCW's findings have made a mockery of this.

I don’t support any Islamic terrorist. I do support those poor bastards who protested against the Assad regime and got massacred as a result.

I don’t support a mass murdering regime that has used every weapon available to it, including WMDs, to kill its own civilians. You do.

WMDs. Are you talking about Bush & Bliar's war in Iraq now? Because this sounds awfully familiar. If you're talking about Syria, you're ignoring the OPCW's findings, which is really ironic (and hypocritical), given how often they were cited in arguments about the Skripals. There is no mass-murdering regime in Damascus. There are mass murdering regimes in Washington and London, which have invaded countless nations and created wars and conflicts that have resulted in an estimated 20 million deaths since WWII alone, including several million in the Middle East since the start of the 90s. A standard method which has become very apparent is to arm and train terrorist proxies. The most quoted source in mainstream media from terrorist-held areas has been the White Helmets. Now they have been evacuated by Israel as government troops supported by their Russian allies destroy the last of ISIS. This has become possible because Trump withdrew American support for them - and the conflict - albeit a little belatedly and a couple of parting shots since proved to be based on false accusations. The OPCW findings have shot your theories about chemical weapons use by the Syrian government down in flames.

[Sandydragon]

Cherry picking? Previous reports were satisfied that chemical weapons, WMDs, were used in earlier barracks. This report only ruled out some types of chemical weapons, not all.

[Sandydragon]

Here is the OCPW statement.

https://www.opcw.org/news/article/opcw- ... b-in-2016/

No evidence of certain chemical weapons in those two attacks, but injuries consistent with exposure to an irritating agent such as Chlorine.

The report also states that the use of chemical weapons in previous attacks has been proven.

[rowan]

The accusations, which you echoed, were about the use of nerve agents against a civilian population in Douma. The OPCW's findings have disproved this - completely. You have yet to admit you were wrong about this.

Chlorine is what's in your toothpaste. Easily available and hardly likely to have been used as artillery by the Syrian or Russian militaries. Neither do the findings apportion blame - and this also applies to previous findings. We have already discussed at length the previous attacks and there is substantial evidence - and logic, given the timing - to suggest they were carried out by the US-backed terrorists themselves. But going back to those debates is simply your attempt to worm out of this one.

You should just admit you were wrong, as was much of the mainstream press - and of course the warmongering governments who seized upon the (now disproved) accusations to drop yet more bombs on a Middle Eastern nation not yet under their control.

[canta_brian]

I was going to respond, but then I remembered it was Rowan and thought what's the fucking point.

[Sandydragon]

Changing th e topic Rowan. I didn’t mention a specific attack, you did. You claimed that the Assad regime wasn’t a mass murdering one. The independent experts you cited disagree with you on that score.

And have you seriously never heard of chlorine gas shells. Really?! And again, what about the other incidents when independent experts did blame the Assad regime. You are apologising for a regime which uses WMDs against its own people. Do you have any actual arguments to the contrary, because at the moment you are coming across as a troll by repeating the same propaganda over and over again.

Stop referring to arguments over WMDs in Iraq. It’s just a distraction to this debate.

[rowan]

So this is what happens when you are proved wrong, Sandy, as you clearly were in supporting Western mainstream news reports that nerve agents had been used against civilians in Douma. Again, since you're obviously not getting it, the OPCW's findings have disproved this completely, and no blame has been apportioned by them for the chlorine attack. Takes a big man to admit he's wrong...

You should actually apply those same comments to yourself, Sandy, because it is you who is changing the topic and defending the mass murdering regimes of America and Britain, and many independent experts will disagree with you. And the idea of the Syrian army using chlorine as artillery is absurd enough, let alone just after Trump has announced America's withdrawal from the conflict (which the US started in the first place and joined illegally in the second).

This makes your claim of WMD's used against ones own people as baseless and heinous as Bush & Bliar's lies about WMD's in Iraq, Sandy, a war that had led to at least a million deaths, millions more wounded, bereaved, disenfranchised and otherwise traumatized - on a scale of genocidal proportions. & such lies have become the blueprint for successive invasions and interventions in other Middle Eastern nations - leading to several million deaths and a refugee tidal wave.

So do you have any actual arguments to the offer, Sandy, because at the moment you are coming across as a troll by repeating the same propaganda over and over again?

[Digby]

We do know Iraq had WMDs as we sold the bloody things to them, we just didn’t know they'd used them all and didn't want to admit it. The problem was without a clear understanding of that we tried to establish a legal position for military intervention, the likes of Syria and Russia don't have the same problems as they couldn't give a rat's ass about even fabricating a legal justification

[rowan]

Major difference is America and Britain turned up from the other side of the planet to bomb Iraq into the dark ages so that they could control the oil industry, leading to at least a million deaths, more than a decade of war, and ongoing terrorism, whereas the Syrian government and their long-standing Russian (and Iranian) allies have quite heroically defended Syria from precisely that fate - despite the substantial death toll and suffering brought about by this latest US-orchestrated attempt at regime-change.

[Digby]

Not sure actually, perhaps that latest is a recipe for pumpkin soup